What are the most common types of pest damage?

This page answers a different question than 'which pest costs the most to fix.' Here, the criterion is simple: what does an NH pest professional and an NH homeowner actually encounter most often, regardless of how severe it could theoretically become? That produces a very different order than a severity ranking — rodent gnawing and cosmetic staining, both common and rarely catastrophic, outrank termite galleries, which are rarer but more consequential when found. Neither ranking is wrong; they're answering different questions, and conflating them is exactly how a nuisance turns into a headline about collapse.

Rodent gnawing tops this list because it's tied to a universal biological need, not an occasional behavior: a mouse or rat's incisors grow continuously and must be worn down, so wire insulation, plastic supply lines, and stored goods get chewed on a routine basis wherever rodents get indoors, which in New Hampshire is strongly seasonal as temperatures fall toward the first hard frost. That gnawing is also where the hub's most repeated fire statistic lives, and it deserves the correction every time it comes up: rodent gnawing on energized wiring is a genuine, documented ignition pathway, but the specific claim that rodents cause roughly a quarter of house fires has no primary source in NFPA or federal fire data — it traces to an uncited 2012 pest-trade magazine article. The mechanism is real; the number is not.

Droppings and soiling are the next most common complaint, and for most cases that's genuinely cosmetic — a stain, an odor, a surface to wipe down. Carpenter ant galleries round out the everyday tier, and UNH Cooperative Extension is clear that they're chiefly a signal of a moisture problem rather than a wood-eating one on their own; the ants excavate, they don't consume, and they gravitate to wood that's already wet.

The most under-rated entry on this list isn't a structural one at all. Cockroach and rodent allergen contamination doesn't show up as a hole, a stain, or a gnaw mark — it accumulates in household dust and is a well-documented trigger for asthma, particularly in children in homes with a heavier infestation history. It rarely gets discussed alongside 'pest damage' because there's nothing visible to photograph, but by frequency and genuine harm to occupants, it belongs on this list more than several pests people worry about far more.

Termite damage is the honest exception to this list's overall message. It's less common in day-to-day complaints than gnawing or staining, but when it's present it's the one entry that can require a licensed contractor to rebuild framing rather than a repair job measured in an afternoon. That combination — lower frequency, higher consequence — is exactly why the hub keeps termites, rodent gnawing, and carpenter ants graded as genuinely earned concerns even while it corrects the statistics wrapped around them.